Posted by: Richard Ellmyer - May 15, 2008 09:18 AM

Off topic; deleted by editor.

Posted by: Art - May 15, 2008 09:43 PM

Jeff,

LoL! You are a nut! I mean that in a good way. Jon Stewart better watch out, I can see a whole show on are you miffed with TIF, from Park Ave. to Park bench.

Please for your next video can you please explain the wonderful relationship between the State of Oregon and how generous they are in reimbursing our county.

Posted by: Jeff Cogen - May 16, 2008 09:30 AM

Thanks Art!

Posted by: golden - May 19, 2008 08:19 PM

Wow! Good explanation, dry whit and a pink shirt. A+

Posted by: bird - May 22, 2008 09:21 AM

I like it. Explanations that makes sense to people is going to make it harder for the landowners that wants get money for their rocks. "Don't buy Rocks" can be the new buzz word.
In our little city, they decided to renew an area owned by all the good old folks that also believe they own our town! It is where all the crime is. This is good for us, that means the crime will now have to spread out to our neighborhood instead of just being down there where it can't harm any of their rocks.

Posted by: mara - May 22, 2008 10:05 AM

Jeff,

Congrats on your success in securing the agreement. Also, great primer - it must be great, since it makes me want to know more about a topic you describe as sleep inducing. Questions that come to mind...

If UR dollars are only allowed to be spent on infrastructure, what does the agreement with Multnomah County do? Does it somehow free up dollars for human services? Also, I'm inferring from your general description of URAs that you see significant problems with the basic UR structure - can you talk about ideas to change UR and the opportunities for and barriers to reform?

Posted by: Jeff Cogen - May 22, 2008 11:58 AM

Thanks for the good questions. The agreeement we reached with PDC doesn't allow urban renewal dollars to be used for human services - that would require a change to state law.

However, it does make 3 important changes: 1) Multnomah County will now have a seat at the table for all future urban renewal decisions, so we can make sure that the tradeoffs involved in urban renewal (ie: dollars sequestered in an urban renewal area aren't available to invest in human servcies, schools, etc.)are considered and no one thinks this is "free money"; 2) PDC agrees to consider ways to minimize the impact of urban renewal on other jurisdictions' finances (such as "bricks and mortar" investments in County facilities, that while consistent with urban renewal law, can also free up operational dollars that can fund human services); and 3) PDC agreees to make investments in facilities, like affordable housing or the new homeless access center, that serve the needs of people that depend on the County for services.

Collectively these 3 changes are a significant step in the right direction. It's also worth remembering that urban renewal has been very succesful at mainting our vital urban core and can benefit the entire community in the long run, if the investments are wisely made. But we need to ensure that we consider the needs of the entire community and the realities of the 21st centtury, as opposed to the 1950s, when urban renewal began.

Posted by: DE - May 22, 2008 02:14 PM

Jeff,

Your Pearl-Cully "Robin Hood in reverse" example struck me as pure demagoguery. Using rich versus poor to summarize the program is incomplete and dishonest. I could just as simply say that The Lents Urban Renewal area steals from the ritzy Portland Heights neighborhood and gives to the poor SE Lents Neighborhood, but that too would be dishonest. We could have this debate forever with me saying it's Robin Hood and you saying it's reverse Robin Hood, OR you could stop using simplistic metaphors to rally people to your side of the argument, and have a truthful debate about urban renewal. Why not?

Posted by: Bridget - May 22, 2008 02:39 PM

DE -

If the people who live in the Portland Heights neighborhood weren't at all profiting from the Lents (and other) renewal projects, maybe you'd have a point. As I understand it, while urban renewal does attract lots of great new businesses and investments (often from Portland Heights-type individuals, I might add) and creates jobs for those in the surrounding community, it also drives real estate prices sky-high, which has the effect of raising surrounding rents - and which means that a lot of those lower-income people who would otherwise benefit from those new jobs are forced out of the neighborhood as affordable housing opportunities evaporate.

That is, the new "zone of opportunity" ought to benefit both the rich and the poor to equal extents, in that they both have added incentives & lower barriers to start successful businesses - but in reality, the TRULY poor are forced out of the neighborhood as rents are raised and as a result they don't even get access to all of those great new jobs in the neighborhood. And as Mr. Cogen points out, there are then fewer resources available to help those people move out of the neighborhood, use food stamps as they pay back moving costs, police the neighborhoods that are then affected by the influx of lower-income people, etc.

Anyway, just my two cents. Thanks much for the video & discussion, Mr. Cogen!

Posted by: paul g. - May 22, 2008 04:39 PM

Jeff

Finally! Please god move this forward.

If you saw the recent campaign pattern map for Portland City Council, it also makes it sadly clear why urban renewal dollars are spent mainly in the city core (and in my own opinion, why districting in the City council is so desperately needed)--the votes, the money, the influence, the services, and the candidates all come from a small inner ring.

Urban renewal is robbing from Paul to pay for Peter and in the process, starving our schools and our infrastructure.

A lot of glitzy Pearl districts won't do much good if we continue to hollow out the outer rings of our fine city.

Posted by: DE - May 22, 2008 07:01 PM

"If the people who live in the Portland Heights neighborhood weren't at all profiting from the Lents (and other) renewal projects..."

Thank you Bridget, for providing further examples of my point. Do you have any evidence to back up the statement that any (much less ALL) people in P. Heights are profiting from Lents? The people who profit from Urban Renewal come from hundreds of neighborhoods around this city and urban area, including Portland Heights, but also Irvington, Sellwood, Belmont, and the suburbs. Investors who provide money to URA developers come from around the WORLD. My criticism of you and Jeff is that you simplify it as if to suggest that there is a direct take from the poor in one neighborhood and a give to the rich in another.

On your statement about property values, the whole point of urban renewal is to raise property values and as a result property taxes, so I won't argue with you on that. The idea, however, that people are being priced out of URA neighborhoods is largely ficticious, as very, very few URAs include residential neighborhoods. The number of people living in the Pearl or the MLK URA when they were designated was extraordinarily small. The fact of the matter is that any meaningful improvement in quality-of-life in or near a neighborhood is going to attract people with higher incomes. The only way to avoid it is to stop investing in poor neighborhoods.

Paul G. More urban renewal dollars are spent in the center city because more are generated there than any other neighborhood. Moreover, the central employment district of any city is owned by all of its residents, not the few who live or work there, or own property there.

Posted by: Steve - May 22, 2008 07:36 PM

"More urban renewal dollars are spent in the center city because more are generated there than any other neighborhood."

Then for God's sake why do we have to keep pouring more and more money downtown? It gets spent there because that's where they want to build monuments.

Mr COgen is right we have been at this 50 years and neighborhoods are still pretty much the same - Portland Heights and Lents are at economically disparate ends of the spectrum after all this time. SO again tell me what the purpose is for pouring all this money one place and not the other.

PS - After Mssrs Wheeler and Cogen, I think Mult CO is finally going in the right direction.

Posted by: DE - May 22, 2008 10:06 PM

Hah! Neighborhoods are pretty much still the same!? Are you kidding me? You haven't been around long. Downtown neighborhoods from 23rd to thr Pearl to the West End are dramatically different from 50, 40, and 30 years ago. I'm not saying everything is peachy, but the quality of life in Portland is markedly improved in no small part due to urban renewal.

As for the statement that Lents and PHeights are at opposite ends of the spectrum, that's an irrelevant argument. The goal of urban renewal is to improve, not to make the poorest neighborhoods the richest and vice versa. The simple premise of your statement, that we're "pouring all this money one place and not the other," is patently false. Never has a rich residential neighborhood been designated for urban renewal funding. It is, by definition, directed at blight. You could argue that we should stop spending when the blight is eliminated, as in the Pearl. I would agree. But continuing to suggest that this is reverse Robin Hood is BOGUS.

Posted by: Allison - May 23, 2008 01:23 PM

I'm not sure this video did elucidate anything for me.

On the one hand, obviously pricing people out of housing and exiling them to the 'burbs is a bad thing. Especially when that happens repeatedly. At some point, we run out of Portland for them. On the other hand, does anyone remember what the pearl was like before the renewal began? Sure you do - old town is basically still like that. Dangerous, blighted, economically depressed.

If the purpose of urban renewal is to take blighted neighborhoods and turn them into economically productive ones, than it does what it's supposed to. We can discuss whether or not we get the return on investment we want and further discuss what the time frame for getting that investment should be. It has side effects, though - important side effects that need to be addressed.

Portland Heights was always hoity-toity and decreasing crime at its borders is a good cause, even if they don't "deserve" it as much as perhaps the people in Lents do. But taking all the money that was used to renew the Pearl and spending it in the Lents area is not going to magically change Lents - we can do *something* there, but not the same thing. First of all it is not nor will it ever be dense enough to have the same economic effects. No amount of stupidly expensive furniture stores is going to change Lents. Part of the reason the Pearl became the bastion of the bourgeois it is, is because of it's proximity to the downtown area - people were choosing to live in the Pearl, near where they worked. We didn't make those people wealthy - they came wealthy and put their money there.

If Lents needs new buildings built, let's do urban renewal. If Lents needs human service, let's do something else.

Posted by: Joshua Todd - May 23, 2008 03:54 PM

Great job, Jeff!

I posted it to the Youth Commission's facebook page. Hope you and Katherine, your youth liaison have had a chance to meet up. She is great!

Josh

Posted by: Steve Buel - May 23, 2008 05:36 PM

Thanks, Jeff. This type of thing needs to be said. There is a huge upper middle class and lower economic divide in Portland and people who suggest this isn't something to talk about are usually in the neighborhoods which benefit. The school district is still the best example where the wealth of the neighborhood determines the quality of the schools in that neighborhood. Kind of an economic segregation, not much removed from the racial segregation of the Jim Crow South. We even have organizations like Stand for Children, the School Foundation, and the editorial board of The Oregonian who act kind of like the White Citizens Councils in the South to make sure things stay the way they are. After all, the white people in the South weren't so much trying to keep black people down as afraid that their influence in their own children's schools would weaken those schools. Same idea here in Portland.

Posted by: Steve - May 23, 2008 09:25 PM

"Downtown neighborhoods from 23rd to thr Pearl to the West End are dramatically different from 50, 40, and 30 years ago."

How much PDC money was involved on 23rd, SE Hawthorne, NE ALberta?

"It is, by definition, directed at blight."

OK, then let's fix blight and not create new neighborhoods (or play SIM City) when the current ones people live in are decaying. Tell me what PDC has done to help Lents or Cully or outer SE? Its always more fun to pkay big with taxpayer money, yet they are a total flop at affordable housing.

If your point is to pour money where we can get a return on it in the form of taxes, then, heck, lets cut to the quick and build Intel or Nike a factory if they fill it full of workers, what's the diff? Bring the jobs here from Hillsboro/Bvtn and increase tax receipts from employees.

We'll always have developers willing to build $600K condos, but not so much affordable housing. Aren't the priorities a little screwed up?